property under seal, when the whole diabolical arsenal of
poison-murder which had been at the villain's disposal was discovered,
and also the letters of Madame de Brinvilliers, which left no doubt as
to her crimes. She fled to a convent at Liege. Desgrais, an officer of
the Marechaussee, was sent after her. Disguised as a priest, he got
admitted into the convent, and succeeded in involving the terrible
woman in a love-affair, and in getting her to grant him a clandestine
meeting in a sequestered garden outside the town. When she arrived
there she found herself surrounded by Desgrais' myrmidons; and her
ecclesiastical gallant speedily transformed himself into the officer of
the Marechaussee, and compelled her to get into the carriage which was
waiting outside the garden, and drove straight away to Paris,
surrounded by an ample guard. La Chaussee had been beheaded previously
to this, and La Brinvilliers suffered the same death. Her body was
burnt, and its ashes scattered to the winds.

The Parisians breathed freely again when the world was freed from the
presence of this monster, who had so long wielded, with impunity,
unpunished, the weapon of secret murder against friend and foe. But it
soon became bruited abroad that the terrible art of the accursed La
Croix had been, somehow, handed down to a successor, who was carrying
it on triumphantly. Murder came gliding like an invisible, capricious
spectre into the narrowest and most intimate circles of relationship,
love, and friendship, pouncing securely and swiftly upon its unhappy
victims. Men who, to-day, were seen in robust health, were tottering
about on the morrow feeble and sick; and no skill of physicians could
restore them. Wealth, a good appointment or office, a nice-looking
wife, perhaps a little too young for her husband, were ample reasons
for a man's being dogged to death. The most frightful mistrust snapped
the most sacred ties. The husband trembled before his wife; the father
dreaded the son; the sister the brother. When your friend asked you to
dinner, you carefully avoided tasting the dishes and wines which he set
before you; and where joy and merriment used to reign, there were now
nothing but wild looks watching to detect the secret murderer. Fathers
of families were to be seen with anxious looks, buying supplies of food
in out-of-the-way places where they were not known, and cooking them
themselves in dirty cook-shops, for dread of treason in their own
h